Divide and conquer? How partitioned audiences shape the impact of domain-spanning innovation

• In Event: 40263 - Knowledge Markets, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

Abstract

How does domain-spanning innovation fulfill its transformative and ground-breaking potential? Previous research highlights two types of innovation impact, its size and its disruptiveness—whether it radically departs from prior work and disrupts the status quo—and suggests the disruptive nature of innovation may be shaped by producers differently from the impact size. We contend that fully addressing this question requires us to focus on audiences and suspect that how the two types of innovation impact is shaped is contingent on the structure of audiences—especially the degree to which they are partitioned into distinct subsets. We focus on the realm of science, and its prototypical form of domain-spanning innovation: interdisciplinary research. By compiling data on thousands of scientists and over half a million scientific papers from the Web of Science, and calculating sophisticated measures of impact and audience partitioning, we find that spanning disciplines boosts both types of research impact. When interdisciplinary research reaches a partitioned audience, the size of its impact is stifled, but its disruptiveness is heightened. We discuss how and why a more partitioned audience lets the transformative and ground-breaking potential of domain-spanning innovation shine.

Authors

• Eugene Paik, University of Mississippi

• Jina Lee, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Erin Leahey, University of Arizona

• Russell J. Funk, University of Minnesota